China in Britain #2. Film

Thursday May 31st 2012, 9.45 am – 4.45 pm
Room 451, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

This is the second in a series of colloquia organised as part of China in Britain: Myths and Realities, an AHRC-funded research network project to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain, and based at Westminster. The colloquia will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

This second event on film will begin with a screening at 10.00am of the 1988 film Soursweet, directed by Mike Newell (most popularly known for his direction of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). This will be followed by an afternoon talk from Newall and roundtable discussion (2.30pm).

The day will also include presentations of their film work by Rosa Fong and Lab Ky Mo (12.15pm) and conclude with a paper by Jeffrey Richards (Lancaster University) on ‘Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril (3.45pm).

RSVP – Places are free but strictly limited so it is essential to register with the project’s Principal Investigator, Anne Witchard, at: anne@translatingchina.info

WEBSITE:  http://www.translatingchina.info

Soho Poly Theatre Festival
40th anniversary celebrations
19-21 June, 2012

2012 marks 40 years since The Soho Poly Theatre (now Soho Theatre) moved into a tiny basement on Riding House Street and established itself as one of the most famous fringe venues of the 1970s and 80s. It was the home of innovative new writing, and a launch pad for many actors and directors still at work today. Under the early directorship of Fred Proud and Verity Bargate, the theatre inspired incredible devotion amongst those it worked with. It was also a pioneer of ‘lunchtime’ theatre, an innovation which liberated writers to experiment with new forms of dramatic writing. From 19-21 June, the theatre will be coming back to life for a series of short plays, readings and panel discussions about theatre then and now.

Tuesday 19 June, 7pm: Fred Proud, the Soho Poly Theatre’s first artistic director, will introduce the festival, followed by a reading of Robert Holman’s short play ‘Coal’.

Wednesday 20 June: The festival hosts The Miniaturists, who will present three twenty minute plays at 1pm and again at 7pm. There will also be a panel discussion on innovative theatrical forms with representatives from the current Soho Theatre, time TBC.

Thursday 21 June, 1-2pm: ‘Theatre Then and Now’ – a lunchtime conversation with Michael Billington, Michael Coveney and Irving Wardle.

Thursday 21 June, 7pm: An evening reading of David Edgar’s play ‘Baby Love’, followed by a drinks reception in a nearby venue, TBC.

Unless otherwise mentioned, all events will take place in situ in the original basement at 16 Riding House Street: http://g.co/maps/uev2w

Please email festival organiser Matthew Morrison at matt.morrison77@gmail.com for any further information about the individuals and companies involved, interviews and photos. Tickets are free, but because of the size of the venue, availability is limited. Please email sohopolyfestival@gmail.com for all reservations, mentioning which events you are interested in attending. You can also follow the festival on our blog http://sohopolyfestival.blogspot.co.uk/ and Twitter @SohoPolyFest.

Narratives of Suburbia

Friday 15^th June 2012, 9.15am – 5.15pm
Room 354, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Programme attached here: Narratives of Suburbia Programme[1]

Entrance is FREE but space is limited so please book your place in advance by contacting the organisers, Christopher Daley (daleyc@westminster.ac.uk) and Aisling McKeown (A.Mckeown@westminster.ac.uk).

China in Britain #1. Film
Thursday May 10th 2012, 10.00 am – 6.00 pm

An important message from the organisers: because of our support for UCU Strike Action on May 10th, the venue has been transferred from the University of Westminster to The Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh St., Russell Square, London WC1H OXG: http://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/

The first in a series of colloquia organised as part of China in Britain: Myths and Realities, an AHRC-funded research network project to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain, and based at Westminster. The colloquia will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

Participants include: Ross Forman (University of Warwick); Felicia Chan (University of Manchester) and Andy Willis (University of Salford); Jo Ho (filmmaker). The day will end with Guo Xiaolu introducing a screening of her film She, A Chinese, followed by a Q and A.

RSVP – Places are free but strictly limited so it is essential to register with the project’s Principal Investigator, Anne Witchard, at: anne@translatingchina.info

WEBSITE:  http://www.translatingchina.info

Narratives of Suburbia

Friday 15^th June 2012, 9.15am – 5.15pm
Room 354, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Programme: Narratives of Suburbia Programme[1]

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster is delighted to host the 17^th Westminster Colloquium  entitled ‘Narratives of Suburbia’ on Friday 15^th June 2012. The colloquium aims to assess contemporary representations of suburbia in British and North American fiction, with a particular focus on the exponential growth of suburbia since the Second World War and the fictional offshoots it has produced. By exploring the work of Anglo-American authors, the objective is to identify thematic and stylistic areas of convergence and  divergence.

Speakers:
John Beck (Newcastle)
Christine Berberich (Portsmouth)
Professor Neil Campbell (Derby)
Mark Clapson (Westminster)
Martyn Colebrook (Hull)
Martin Dines (Kingston )
Nick Hubble (Brunel)
Rupa Huq (Kingston)

Entrance is FREE but space is limited so please book your place in advance by contacting the organisers, Christopher Daley (daleyc@westminster.ac.uk) and Aisling McKeown (A.Mckeown@westminster.ac.uk). Full programme to follow. 

Th

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857), the Father of Flight

Friday 27^th April, 1.00-.200 pm
The Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG

This Royal Society lecture discusses Cayley’s pioneering aviation work, and his roles as an inventor and as founder of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street. Cayley’s work will be related to the scientific and intellectual milieu of the day, and to debates regarding the public engagement with science and technology. The lecture will be delivered by Alan Morrison, who is an Honorary Fellow in the IMCC at the University of Westminster, as well as a Lemelson Center Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He curated the exhibition ‘Sir George Cayley: the Father of Flight’ shown at the RAF Museum Hendon.

The lecture is open and free to the public – there is no need to book, and seats are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Sports and the City
April 24-25 2012
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent St, London W1B

Organised by our friends in the Department of Social and Historical Studies at Westminster, the University is staging a two-day conference on sport and the city. The conference will also include a reception to launch Mark Clapson’s book An Education in Sport: Competition, Communities and Identities at the University of Westminster Since 1864, which constitutes the second part of the University’s ‘History Project’.

The conference costs £60 for both days, including lunch and drinks reception. A student rate of £30 is also available.

To register please contact Anna McNally at archive@westminster.ac.uk and details will be given for credit card payment.

China in Britain #2. Film

Thursday May 31st 2012, 9.45 am – 4.45 pm
Room 451, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW  

This is the second in a series of colloquia organised as part of China in Britain: Myths and Realities, an AHRC-funded research network project to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain, and based at Westminster. The colloquia will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

This second event on film will begin with a screening at 10.00am of the 1988 film Soursweet, directed by Mike Newell (most popularly known for his direction of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). This will be followed by an afternoon talk from Newall and roundtable discussion (2.30pm).

The day will also include presentations of their film work by Rosa Fong and Lab Ky Mo (12.15pm) and conclude with a paper by Jeffrey Richards (Lancaster University) on ‘Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril (3.45pm).

RSVP – Places are free but strictly limited so it is essential to register with the project’s Principal Investigator, Anne Witchard, at: anne@translatingchina.info

WEBSITE:  http://www.translatingchina.info

David Cunningham will be speaking in the series of ‘Big Ideas’ pub philosophy talks held at the Wheatsheaf in London on Tuesday 27^th March, 8pm. The topic is: ‘Are Cities Important to Philosophy?’ And here’s the blurb:

Socrates in Athens; Kant in Konigsberg; Hegel in Jena; Russell in Oxford; Carnap in Vienna; Sartre in Paris. Cities, of course, attract cultural production of all kinds to themselves, and the great cities act as magnets for philosophers just as they do for artists, entrepreneurs and chancers. But is there something more to the relationship between philosophy and the city? Has the course of Western philosophy been influenced by its overwhelmingly urban setting?

Further details at: http://bigi.org.uk/events/cities-philosophy/

A quick plug for the London Reading Club, a new blog for the book group attached to the MA Writing the City at the University of Westminster, which is run by our own Monica Germana. Check out posts that discuss London writings ranging from Virginia Woolf to Monica Ali here: http://thelondonreadingclub.wordpress.com/

AV London
Through the Lens: Embodying the City
12th December 2011 to 12^th January
309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London W1B 2UW

A very successful opening party for two exhibitions, ‘AV London’ and ‘Through the Lens: Embodying the City’, curated by students on our Masters programmes in Cultural and Critical Studies, Museums, Galleries & Contemporary Culture, and Visual Culture. Thanks to Kristian Agustin for the photos. Both shows are on until January 12^th at 309 Regent Street, so do go and check them out.

‘Through the Lens’ explores the relationship between the body and the urban environment. The collection of photographs explores the contrasts of corporeal dynamism and the solid urban canvas. The exhibition features contributions from four London based artists who each have an individual interpretation of the relationship between the people and the city: Michael Frank, Christina Lange, Peter Tweedie and Konstantinos Vasileiou. Further details on the exhibition website at: http://embodyingthecity.blogspot.com/

Curated by Eleni Tziourtzia, Angelica Sada, Xiaosong Liu, Ciara Fitzpatrick (curatorial); Alice Gibbs, Elena Griva, Katrina Macapagal (texts); Fliss Hooton, Nadia Little (production); Kristian Jeff Agustin, Alessandra Ferrini (design).

‘AV London’ is an exhibition of Stereoscopic (3D Photography) and Binaural recordings made the artist Gary Welch, which capture a cornucopia of sights, sounds and voices of the diverse metropolis of London. Welch’s installations transform the basic viewer into viewer-listener, who then becomes the ears and eyes of the ‘anyperson’ interacting with seven unique moments in London.

Curated by Elisa Adami, Miguel Corte Real, Leonardo Couto, Nihan Gumrukcuoglu, Silvia Morena, Menming Ran, Z Amber Richter, Kalliopi Tsipini-Kolaza, Simone van Eijk, Laura Vichick.

The IMCC’s Anne Witchard will be speaking about her forthcoming book at the following event organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre:

Wednesday 7 December 2011, 4.30-6.30pm
Westminster Forum, Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

‘Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London’
Anne Witchard (University of Westminster)

Chinese cultural and intellectual texts engaged in various ways with Western constructions of modernism. Of these exchanges and encounters, my focus in this paper will be on the early life and work of the famous Chinese novelist and short story writer, Lao She (1898 – 1966). Lao She was uniquely positioned in his engagement with specific conditions of modernity and nationhood both in Britain and in China. By birth a disenfranchised Manchu, he lived and worked in London during the late 1920s, a period seen as the apex of high modernism and his writing registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his work beyond the parameters of the socialist realist tradition to which, chiefly because of his proletarian magnum opus, Rickshaw Boy (1936), it has largely been confined. Reading Lao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subjects and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves also to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.

Anne Witchard teaches in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She specialises in representations of China and the Chinese in early-twentieth-century Britain (see her book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, Ashgate, 2010; and most recent of various papers, a chapter in the collection Chinatowns in a Transnational World, Routledge, 2011). Her book Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution will be published in Autumn 2012 by the University of Hong Kong Press.

All welcome, but non-Westminster attendees should register in advance with Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Brixton Calling!
28 October-21 December 2011, weekdays 10am-5pm
198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Brixton

This exhibition is the final stage of Brixton Calling! archiving and community project that connects contemporary Brixton to its past through the history of the late Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective in the 1980s. Exhibition opening: Thursday 27 October 2011, 6.30-10pm.

UPDATE: Further details on the 198 website here: http://198.org.uk/pages/currentexhibition.htm

Brixton Calling! events at 198 

Saturday 19 November, 2-4pm,  Curators/artists talk
Friday 25 November, 7-9pm, Brixton Fairy Night
Saturday 26 November, 1-5pm, Radical Printing
Saturday 10 December, 2-5pm, Black Art

Other Brixton Calling! events:

’80s Women Lens Based Media Event
Brixton Village, Thursday10 & Friday11 November, 7-12pm, Saturday12 November, 10am–9pm
For more information contact: info@198.org.uk

Women Artists Feminism in the 80s and Now
Goldsmiths, University of London 3rd December, 10am-5pm, in collaboration with the Women’s Art Library
For more information contact: a.greenan@gold.ac.uk

Archive installation by Stefan Szczelkun and Oral History documentary on show continuously along with many other sub-projects!

Wednesday 10th October 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Helen Glew (History, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Michael Nath’s first novel La Rochelle was shortlisted for the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. At the award ceremony held at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chair of the judges Lee Spinks outlined his appreciation book in conversation with Sally Magnusson.

Tuesday 3rd May, 6.00 pm
Hogg Lecture Theatre, University of Westminster, Marylebone site

Our friends in the Department of Architecture at Westminster are hosting a screening of the Utopia London, a documentary film by young director Tom Cordell, which explores London’s recent architectural history through the eyes of those who helped create it and those whose lives were shaped by it. The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with Tom as well as a panel of architects who are interviewed in the film.

“I’ve always been drawn to the excitement of London’s post-war landscape; concrete and brick textures, unadorned clean lines, neon glow and dark shadows. … Yet all our lives we have been told that the same urban spaces are ugly – symbols of a failed, arrogant technocracy. … I began to contact the people who tried to change the city, and my narrative thread continued to shift around as the filming went on. And what I found was that the power of the buildings came from the vision they were meant to serve – and that it’s this vision that so polarises opinion. They symbolise an attempt to build a fair, open society, and their existence frightens people who have rejected these values.” Tom Cordell

Art group ‘Fitzrovia Noir’ are organizing the Fitzrovia Intervention Art Trail.

It is Fitzrovia Noir’s wish to bring contemporary independent art practice to a wider audience in Fitzrovia, and they will be placing original artwork in 20-25 local shops and businesses for a period of 3 weeks in Spring 2011. We at the Institute are thrilled that our Wells Street location is on the trail.

Please see http://www.fitzrovianoir.com/page23.htm for further details of the trail, dates of artist-led guided tours, etc. Further details on Fitzrovia Noir here.

No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City
Tuesday 15th March, 2 – 4pm
Westminster Forum, 5th Floor, 32 Wells Street, London W1T

As part of the ‘Interpreting Space’ module on our MA programmes, members of the Mute team, Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles, will be visiting Westminster to talk about their co-edited collection No Room to Move: Radical art and the Regenerate City (Mute 2011), and the kinds of issues they were attempting to address. This will be followed by questions from students on the module.

Our neighbours over at Birkbeck are staging their second batch of Night Shift Seminars, and, following Anne Witchard’s talk on Limehouse and ‘London’s Dark Half’ last year, our own Alex Warwick will be responding to a paper by Susanne Scholz of Frankfurt University on Jack the Ripper. The seminar takes place on Thursday 3^rd March at 7.30pm, in Room B03, 43 Gordon Square.

Other seminars in the series include Matthew Beaumont, co-editor of Restless Cities, on Nightwalking (Friday 21st January, 6pm), and a roundtable with Fiona Candlin, Luisa Cale and Roger Luckhurst on ‘Nights at the Museum’ (Thursday 5^th May, 6pm, Council Room, Birkbeck College, Malet Street). Further details on the series here.

BACA (Brixton Artists Collective Archives group) and 198 Contemporary Art and Learning inform us of the launch of their project Brixton Calling!, funded by Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Funding. and organised in partnership with Lambeth Archives, Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library, and the IMCC at Westminster.

Brixton Calling! is a collaborative and participatory project as well as an exhibition that connects contemporary Brixton to its past. The intergenerational project will bring together Brixton artists and communities to explore some of the Gallery’s collaborative and artistic approaches to social/political issues and create new artworks that are relevant to Brixton today.

The first stage of the BACA Project will be: 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86, Archiving Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective. The project’s main activity is a series of Community Archiving and Engagement projects that will be developed in Brixton between January and September 2011. The outcomes will form, alongside BACA archives, an exhibition that will be held October-December 2011 at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The second stage will be a 2012-201 archiving and research project: BAG Archiving. At the end of the project, archives collected and produced during both stages will be transferred to Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library (Goldsmiths), Lambeth Archives and Carpenter Hall Archive (LSE).

Brixton Calling! Launch Party is scheduled for February 2011. Watch this space!